


forgetting how to be alive.

by clickingkeyboards



Category: Murder Most Unladylike Series - Robin Stevens
Genre: Alzheimer's Disease, Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-14 21:35:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29548707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clickingkeyboards/pseuds/clickingkeyboards
Summary: Daisy is overjoyed by a letter from Lord Hastings, only to be shocked back down to earth when an offhand comment in his writing sends her spiralling.Her father is forgetting what she looks like, and one day he will forget her altogether.
Relationships: Daisy Wells & Hazel Wong
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	forgetting how to be alive.

Daisy does not get letters from her family often. Bertie and Uncle Felix write regularly, and sometimes her Aunt Eustacia sends us chocolates, but her parents never contact her. This is all why I was so surprised when we collected our letters from our pigeonholes to read together at lunch, and there was one in a very familiar, wobbly hand. 

_ Lord Hastings _ .

Daisy was absolutely giddy. She loves her father immeasurably but in a very peculiar way. Of course, I love my father, but her love for hers is very different. Lord Hastings, you see, forgets things. This means that Daisy does not love him as the rest of us love our fathers, but rather she appreciates him as one would appreciate a forgetful elderly relative, calling him a poor dear and defending him fiercely, and trying to make everything simple and understandable for his benefit. 

Ignoring the rest of us, she tore open her letter from her father and eagerly devoured each word. He wrote each line spaced widely apart from the next, his handwriting wobbly and printed as my littlest sister writes hers: as if he is just learning.

“How strangely Daisy is acting!” Amina said to me. She was sitting beside me, which was just another sign of how odd and excited Lord Hastings made Daisy: she had not tried to get a seat next to Amina. “What’s wrong with that letter?”

“Nothing!” I replied, looking over at her and smiling as she pressed her face closer and closer to the letter, practically fizzing with happiness. Daisy being so purely overjoyed is always a treat and I was determined to take it in while I could, this fierce and pleased real version of Daisy appearing in the middle of the day when she is usually so closed off and wearing her mask of perfection. “It’s from her father.”

“Oh!” With a smile on her face that Daisy seems to find rather beautiful, she leant forward and simply admired Daisy’s fascinated, sparkling expression. “How lovely.”

I was busy trying to decipher what Amina was looking at exactly — it was only Daisy’s face, and I have seen the same face every day since I was twelve and a half — when Daisy let out a little gasp. She brought her hand up to her mouth and her breathing fluttered like a caged bird, and I felt terribly afraid all of a sudden that he had brought news of something dreadful.

“Daisy?” I asked carefully, reaching over to touch her hand. 

Unsurprisingly, she pulled away. I was expecting her to say that she was alright, and smile at everybody, fold up the letter and move onto her letter from Bertie. What I did not expect was for Daisy to take a breath that wobbled and shuddered, and then scramble from her seat and flee the dining room, abandoning the letter on the table.

“Daisy!” Beanie shouted, and I was so frantic trying to decide what to do that I did not think to grab the letter. I saw Clementine reaching out for it with a nasty expression, sensing something to gossip about, and Amina snatched up the letter in a flash, reaching across me and grabbing it in one neat movement.

She folded it up and tucked it inside the pocket of her Deepdean blazer, and turned to me. “Are you going to go after her?” she asked, a very intense sort of heat radiating from her. 

“Um… she’s fiercely angry. Shouldn’t I leave her alone?” I said, not really believing my own words.

“She needs  _ you _ , Hazel, don’t be ridiculous.” Amina pushed my shoulder gently and I agreed, letting my worry pull me from my seat and out of the room, and soon I was running up the stairs to our dorm. 

Daisy was not in our dorm, but I knew where she would be: the airing cupboard. With renewed confidence, I grabbed my torch from on top of my chest of drawers and went searching. 

I crept across the landing and cracked open the door, and Daisy was there. She was on the ground with her knees drawn up to her chest and her head buried in her folded arms, golden hair falling about in ringlets everywhere. She trembled with tears and I scrambled to turn on the dim little torch, shutting the door and putting the torch up on one of the shelves to illuminate both of us. When that was done, I dropped to my knees on the rough floor and crawled over to Daisy, touching her hand.

“Daisy? What’s wrong?”

She sniffled and looked up, and her entire face was a terribly blotchy red. “I hate caring about grown-ups,” she said tearfully, and I felt out of my depth. 

“What’s wrong?” I asked, not sure that I would like the answer. 

Wiping her eyes with the backs of her hand and pushing strands of her hair out of her face, she sniffed and said, in a terribly small voice, “Daddy is forgetting what I look like.”

“Oh.” There did not seem to be anything else to say. Lord Hastings is only forty-five, which might seem old for a grown-up but is actually very young indeed. He should not have been forgetting things, and certainly not  _ Daisy _ . My best friend is really very difficult to forget, and so his forgetting must have been truly terrible. “Oh,  _ Daisy _ .”

“Doctor Cooper said this would happen,” Daisy continued, blinking away her tears very determinedly. “Daddy got diagnosed by some very good doctors in London with something called  _ Alzheimer’s _ when I was younger. They told us that it didn’t matter very much, because Daddy wasn’t  _ very  _ forgetful, but that he would start forgetting things eventually. Doctor Cooper came to explain everything to us — well, to Uncle Felix, Mummy didn’t care that much — and he said that, once the forgetting properly starts, it keeps going and going and going and then…”

“And then what?” I asked, with a terrible feeling that I already knew. The idea made me feel cold, icy realisation trickling through my body from where my hand touched Daisy’s.

“And then he dies, Hazel, because he forgets how to be alive.”

Everything felt horrible all of a sudden. Death is not a nice thing at all, and it is even more horrid when it happens to somebody close to you. I murmured, “Daisy?” and did the only thing that seemed sensible: holding out my arms to her. 

With a sob, Daisy scrambled into them, wrapping her arms around my middle and falling against me in a terribly odd tangled position. I stroked her hair as if she was May, upset and curled up on my lap in floods of tears. I needed to be the grown-up for both of us for once, because Daisy was the scared little girl that she had been at Fallingford, except I knew that this would not go away or get proven wrong. “Do you want to go and see him?” I said carefully. “We have an Exeat weekend soon.”

“I never want to see him again, Hazel,” she said, muffled in my school pullover. “Then it will hurt less when he… when he…” She took another wobbling breath and I held her tighter.

“We both know that you don’t mean that.” My reply was careful, but Daisy didn’t pinch me for it, which I thought was good. It had been quite a daring thing to say to a very sad Daisy.

“I think that you are so brave, Hazel, to have kept on detecting after your Ah Yeh died,” Daisy told me, and it was so sincere and sudden that it surprised tears into my eyes. “How did you do it?”

I did not like the idea that Daisy was preemptively preparing for her father’s death, but I knew that I would have done the same thing if I had been warned about Ah Yeh passing. Daisy has always dealt with life and death in a peculiar inside-out way, after all.

“I thought of it in Hong Kong like a pretty dress that I have grown much too big for. I can look at it, the grief and the hurt, and take it out and feel how it aches and study why I feel that way, and look back over all my memories of Ah Yeh, and put it away again as a feeling at the back of my mind.” That seemed to comfort Daisy, and I hated myself a little bit for what I was going to say next. “That’s after the initial hurt goes away. But it never goes away completely.”

“I think that must be the worst part.”

I nodded, though Daisy couldn’t see. “I’m sorry about your dad, Daisy.”

She sniffed. “I feel like a child.”

“You are one,” I pointed out as lightly as I dared.

“You sound dreadfully like Uncle Felix.”

Breathing out a laugh into her hair, I said, “Let’s call Uncle Felix. We can try and arrange for you to see your dad!”

Daisy pulled away and gave me an extremely alarmed look, and I hurried to add, “Only if you want to, of course!”

“It’s not  _ that _ , Watson.” She moved out of my embrace entirely and sat in front of me instead, holding my hands. “You… you’re not going to come with me?”

“I thought you wouldn’t want me there,” I replied, astonished that she would want me there while she saw Lord Hastings, forgetting and not even realising. 

“I cannot be without you, Hazel.” Her blue eyes were wide and honest. “Please come with me.”

“Of course!” I said, squeezing her hands and hoping that I would never forget Daisy Wells. 

I simply would not let myself.


End file.
